Category Archives: Portraiture

Passion projects. The lifeblood of every creative. Neglect them and you soon find yourself seeing a very lacklustre world around you. With Star Wars Episode 7, The Force Awakens around the corner, this fanboy has Star Wars on the brain. It has been quite a long year of commercial work around the world, I was getting that lacklustre feeling about the work I was producing. I was creating great stuff, but it wasn’t ‘mine’.

Over a month ago, prep for this shoot began. It was hours of trawling the internet for reference images, concept art, lightsaber hilt designs. I then began trying to source props, wardrobe, small little elements that would bring it all together. The hunt for my Jedi began. I had an overwhelming response to a simple request: “I’m doing a Star Wars personal project, who wants to be involved?”. I knew however that with the amount of work (and personal money *cough*) I was throwing into this project, it couldn’t be a massive cast. In my mind I only saw it working with 3-5 talent -much like the hero characters in a movie. The talent came from as far as 1600km away to be involved. True Star Wars fans. Exactly what I wanted.

I’m very happy to finally share the first initial round of images from this set: Jedi Portraits. Please feel free (actually, it would be great if you did) to share this as much as possible & share the Star Wars love!

As you learn the hard way being a photographer, the natural progression that it is, you tend to only show one, perhaps two images from a shoot. You learn to be insanely selective when it comes to what you feel is the best presentation from that body of work. I think over the years I’ve gotten pretty good at this & often during the shoot I’ll know when ‘that’ shutter slams closed which is my frame to keep.

Then you get days where you are fortunate enough to work with a talent that far exceeds your own (this is a lot in the beginning days & you become more demanding of yourself & your shoot as time goes by, so it feels more special later on). I found one of these days while shooting the 2015 KIA campaign at the brink of the new year rolling around. The Artist. Mark Johnson (actors name). Perhaps his occupation for the day resonated with me. The perfect combination of actor, location, light, ambiance, art dept and something clicking (haha literally too) together within me. Shooting with people is something I enjoy more than I give myself credit for. The connection for that brief amount of time is like Neo in The Matrix who learns martial arts in one blistering session of intensity. You spend a few moments with your subject & in that time before you have to start shooting, this person has to go, “hey, I trust you enough to let go”. Forced trust & friendship into an hour or two. It’s magical stuff when it happens organically.

In any case, the point of this blog was to share all MY favourites of The Artist with you. Seldom does ‘everything work’ on a shoot. Actually, it virtually never happens except in these rare moments that give you a body of work that you just cannot whittle down to a mere one or two.

I realised that I had in fact forgotten to do a long standing tradition of reviewing a year in retrospect to see what had been done in those 12 months. I had actually put all the content together, but gotten so distracted with how busy 2015 has started off. I also decided to do something new for this blog. I very seldom share any travel images that I shoot while traveling on assignment. 2014 saw loads of travel to some awesome locations, so I’ve added in a few of those just to mix things up a bit. I always have these grand ideas to put together a nice solid selection of travel images, but never seem to get a moment to do it. Perhaps 2015 might be the year for that, who knows. :)

So I’m also going to just add a highlight review of 2014 in no particular calendar month order because I’ve realised it doesn’t actually matter either. It’s the year in review, not month.

The internet has thrown us this new bone that The Queen of Scots has had another portrait shoot. The Daily Mail has been rather flattering about trumping up the shoot. I must admit, with someone as high profile as the Queen, I can’t but help think of the shoots they’ve done in the past. Immediately I think of the session Annie Leibovitz did. If anyone is going to use complimentary adjectives about a fantastic set of images, I think it should be used for Annie’s work.

Yet, without getting too wrapped up in Annie’s work, what are your thoughts about THIS set? My honest opinion is that it isn’t bad. It is a far stretch from what I think it could have been. I’m not referring to the super simple lighting & setup. Or the lack of production. You really don’t NEED this for every shoot. I’m referring to little visual nuances that are missing. Balance between the Queen’s position, her cape (haha) & the river line. Maybe these are things only a photographer would notice & makes us overly critical? Who knows. I just know it doesn’t really sit right to me. This is just completely my opinion & massive credit goes to the photographer for actually getting the Queen to pose in a setting outside the palace. He gets kudos for that! Imagine the nerves.